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Encyclopedia of African-American Writing, Fourth Edition

J. California Cooper

Fiction writer, playwright

Born: November 20, 1931

Died: September 20, 2014

INTRODUCTION

A prolific writer, Joan California Cooper has almost 20 plays (including Everytime It Rains; System, Suckers, and Success; How Now; The Unintended; The Mother; Ahhh; Strangers; and Loners), many of which have been produced on live stage, on radio, and on public television, and some of which have been anthologized. Despite her success as a playwright, Cooper may be better known for her short stories, having published several short-story collections (A Piece of Mine, 1984, published by Alice Walker’s publishing company and including a foreword by Walker; Homemade Love, 1986, winner of a 1989 American Book Award; Some Soul to Keep, 1987; The Matter Is Life, 1991; Some Love, Some Pain, Sometime, 1995; her highly praised The Future Has a Past, 2000; and Wild Stars Seeking Midnight Suns: Stories, 2006).

She has also written many novels: Family (1991), her Civil War-era novel about a slave and her family; In Search of Satisfaction (1994), about the black daughter and the mulatto daughter (and granddaughter) of a former slave from Reconstruction through the 1920s; The Wake of the Wind (1998), a family saga that begins in Africa in the 1760s when two friends are captured, enslaved, and brought to America, where their descendants’ lives intersect in the troublesome and confusing period during and immediately following the Civil War; Some People, Some Other Place (2004), a five-generation story of an African-American family, as told by the unborn child of the protagonist; and Life Is Short But Wide (2009), about two families making their way in an Oklahoma town. Alice Walker praised Cooper’s work as “a delight to read,” and Nikki Giovanni named Cooper “my favorite storyteller.” In addition to awards for her individual works, in 1988, Cooper was named a Literary Lion by the American Library Association and garnered the James Baldwin Writing Award.

IMPACT

In many of her works, Cooper shows the ways in which women offer one another support through times of abuse, neglect, economic difficulties, and other struggles. Despite the challenges they face, Cooper’s characters show optimism, humor, and a strong spirit. They also tend to reinforce feminist family values and Cooper’s firm belief that true happiness comes from within, often because of helping others. Some critics suggest that she tends toward preachiness, but others praise her clear moral stands. In her narratives, Cooper uses authentic vernacular dialogue and first-person accounts, offering one woman’s insights into her own life crises or into the experiences of those whom she observes at close range. Readers frequently feel as though the narrator is speaking directly to them, using a folksy, chatty voice. Cooper’s birthdate is nowhere to be found in available resources about her, and she closely guards her private life; it is known that from her first marriage, she has a daughter, Paris Williams, to whom she has dedicated her fiction.

References

1 

Andrews, William L., Frances Smith Foster, and Trudier Harris (Eds.). 1997. The Oxford Companion to African American Literature. New York: Oxford University Press.

2 

Bolden, Tonya. 1994. Rites of Passage: Stories about Growing Up by Black Writers from around the World. New York: Hyperion Books for Children.

3 

Contemporary Authors Online. Detroit: Gale. 2006. Literature Resources from Gale.

4 

Golus, Carrie, in Black Biography: Contemporary Black Biography. 2006. Detroit: Gale Group.

5 

Hickey, Kevin M., in Ostrom, Hans, and J. David Macey, Jr. (Eds.). 2005. The Greenwood Encyclopedia of African American Literature. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.

6 

King, Lovalerie, in African American Literature: The Concise Oxford Companion to African American Literature. 2001, 2002. New York: Oxford University Press.

7 

Lawrence, Keith, Cracroft, Richard H. (Ed.). 1999. Twentieth-Century American Western Writers: 2nd Series. In Dictionary of Literary Biography (Vol. 212). Detroit: Gale Group.

8 

Valade, Roger M., III. 1996. The Essential Black Literature Guide. Detroit: Visible Ink Press.

9 

Yohe, Kristine A., in Davidson, Cathy N., and Linda Wagner-Martin (Eds.). 1995. The Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States. New York: Oxford University Press.

Citation Types

Type
Format
MLA 9th
"J. California Cooper." Encyclopedia of African-American Writing, Fourth Edition, edited by Laura Nicosia, , James F. Nicosia & , Salem Press, 2022. Salem Online, online.salempress.com/articleDetails.do?articleName=AAW4E_0125.
APA 7th
J. California Cooper. Encyclopedia of African-American Writing, Fourth Edition, In L. Nicosia, , J. F. Nicosia & (Eds.), Salem Press, 2022. Salem Online, online.salempress.com/articleDetails.do?articleName=AAW4E_0125.
CMOS 17th
"J. California Cooper." Encyclopedia of African-American Writing, Fourth Edition, Edited by Laura Nicosia, , James F. Nicosia & . Salem Press, 2022. Salem Online, online.salempress.com/articleDetails.do?articleName=AAW4E_0125.